Top tips on how to best market your fundraising event
Author:
Categorised In:
Share:
Every nonprofit organisation is challenged with restricted budgets. But, why should you prioritise investing in your marketing spend ahead of a fundraising event?
Non-profit marketing helps to raise funds, so it’s important to put budget behind it – just make sure it’s in the right places.
From utilising local PR campaigns to investing in paid media, below we share our top tips and event marketing strategies to lean on if you want your fundraising event to be a success.
Why you should start with a marketing plan
While it would be great to launch an event and have an amazing turn-out with no resource or budget invested in marketing, it’s probably unlikely…
Instead, take a more strategic approach and start by outlining a marketing plan.
Hubspot suggests detailing a nonprofit marketing plan to outline exactly what you want to achieve from the marketing activity, including how and who’s involved. To outline these details, the plan should consist of mapping out marketing SMART goals, target audience information and buyer personas, your mission statement and an outline of key stakeholders involved in the plan – including roles and responsibilities.
When it comes to target audiences, consider details such as age, location, needs and what channels they frequent, to help you target them more effectively.
You might identify you have several target audiences – segment these out so you can clearly see each group.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, use this research to identify the most suitable marketing tactics to help reach these audiences best.
How best to market your fundraising event
Read on to find out five ways to market your fundraiser event so that it reaches the right audiences at the right time, to help your event be a sell-out.
- Invest in local PR
Regional media outlets are a great way to advertise fundraiser events and spread the word to wider audiences in the area – that might not already be engaged with your content.
Considering how to write a press release? Make sure it includes all the key details in a concise, clear way. Hook your event onto a piece of research or data to help form a clear narrative and story to the release – this will help to encourage the journalist to cover the story.
Remember to take a tailored approach, creating various versions of the press release for different regions to make it relevant and personalised for each journalist.
- Utilise organic social channels
Make sure to plan out a dedicated social media strategy in the months and weeks leading up to the event. From launching the event announcement to gearing up excitement, all the way through to during the event and post the event.
Lean on video forms of content too such as TikTok and Instagram reels to engage your audience further and show an authentic side to your content.
- Invest in paid advertising
Investing in PPC such as Google Ads can help you reach new audiences, as you bid for key terms your audience are likely searching for.
Alternatively, consider running paid social ads on channels such as Instagram or Facebook to reach new audiences. Here you can be specific with your targeting, helping you reach the most relevant audience for your event.
Wondering how big your budget for social media marketing should be? Find out more about paid social media budgets.
Drive traffic to a key landing page to register for the event, so you can keep an eye on registration numbers and track the success of your paid media spend.
- Use email marketing tactics
To help spread the reach and awareness of the fundraiser event, email marketing is an effective channel for connecting with existing audiences you might have. For example, you might already have a database of community members, supporters or subscribers to a pre-existing newsletter you might run.
Here you can share the details of the event and invite your community to attend, linking to key information. Consider adding an incentive to encourage numbers on the day too.
- Lean on local ambassadors
To help spread the word further, lean on connections and micro-influencers to share and talk about the event to widen the reach.
Consider adding this activity as part of your social media strategy too, if you do have community ambassadors you can utilise.
How to measure the impact of your fundraising event
Once the event has finished, how can you measure whether it was a success?
Setting KPIs at the beginning of the process can help you set out key pillars of success. Examples of KPIs to track and report performance on might include:
- Total amount of donations raised
- Number of event attendees
- Online press exposure generated
- Number of press coverage / social coverage
- Number of new social media followers
EventBrite recommends looking at sales by source too, enabling you to identify which channel has delivered the best ROI for your marketing spend.
This will help you assess whether the event has been a success or not – and help you identify where your marketing spend was most effective.
Need help with your event marketing strategies?
If you’d like to learn more about how Embryo can help you with your event marketing strategies or any of our other services, reach out to us today.
